Of course Tables make fantastic designs and organized websites but they are not intended for this purpose i.e., Tables were never intended by the creators of HTML to control the visual style of a web page. A Table should really be used for tabular data not for design and layout. But then the HTML instruction {border="0"} made it possible for designers to have a grid upon which to layout images and text.

Even though Tables were intended for the presentation of tabular data, during the early years of the web development, methods using Tables provided one of the few ways of actually controlling the physical layout of a web page. This is now antiquated and technically incorrect, but most designers still rely on it because it can be easier to develop pages this way. Easier can be a very relative term here, as this approach can be much harder and exponentially more expensive over the life of a website.

In the good old days you had no other option, except using Tables if you wanted to give an impressive, graphical presentation on your web page. Using Tables for layouts doesn´t adhere to web standards and web accessibility. Along came CSS a designer´s best friend. In fact, CSS is the key for Tableless layouts. There is no web layout that you can create with a Table that cannot be duplicated with CSS. It has been advocated many times that Tables shouldn't be used in HTML for layout purposes. Still the most dominant means of designing visually rich Web sites, the use of Tables is now actually interfering with building a better, more accessible, flexible, and functional Web.

Basic design principles instruct us to align elements horizontally and vertically to each other to create a well-ordered page. By its very nature, the HTML Table is well suited to these alignment tasks. Although apparently suited to layout on the surface, under the hood it becomes clear that Tables do a pretty lousy job of page construction. Among their shortcomings is the implied bias of the code towards presentation rather than structure, the necessity to nest Tables in order to achieve the most basic of layouts, and enough redundant bandwidth-hogging tags to feed a large family of tag eating monsters for literally a month. Some ingenious discovered the use of Tables. Since that time web designers misused HTML language.

1. Tables are slow, which means that web pages load slowly. Tables don´t have to be slow, if you put each row in a separate Table, then you lose the alignment between rows.
2. Tables are inflexible, Tables render pretty quickly if you specify widths of all columns, problem is you just specify widths for the page.
3. The biggest problem with Tables is they don´t degrade gracefully. If your browser window is wide enough, you get a nice, two-column layout. But if you´re using a narrower browser window the page falls down to a single column
4. Tables don´t print terribly well.You can also have elements that only show up when rendered to a screen, but not to a printer.

However, in the late 90´s, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) introduced Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS enabled the ability to apply styles to HTML documents. As browsers quickly started to integrate CSS support, web designers started to use it to apply simple styles to their HTML, like font type and color, and background colors and images. Over the years, there´s been a steady push to purify how websites are coded. In an effort to create web standards that offer a logical approach, and to provide web accessibility for text-readers, mobile devices, and more, a new standard was created. That standard revolves around the proper use of CSS. CSS should be used to create a unique visual layout and design.

Modern browsers are much better at rendering Web standards and we don't need to use these archaic methods any more. Instead of nesting Tables within Tables and filling empty cells with spacer GIFs, we can use much simpler markup and CSS to lay out beautiful sites that are faster to load, easier to redesign, and more accessible to everyone. By using structural markup in our HTML documents and CSS to lay out our pages, we can keep the actual content of our pages separated from the way they are presented. By removing presentational markup from your pages, redesigns of existing sites and content is much less labor intensive.To change the layout of the site, all you need to do is change the style sheets. You do not need to edit the pages themselves at all. Using Web standards reduces the file sizes of your pages, as users no longer need to download presentational data with each page they visit. The Style sheets that control layout are cached by viewers' browsers. Reduced file size means faster loads and lower hosting costs. Using Web standards also makes it extremely easy to maintain visual consistency throughout a site. Since pages use the same CSS document for their layout, they are all formatted the same. This strengthens your brand and makes your site more usable

These are the reasons why web designers should stop using Tables for layouts, and adopt the use of CSS for controlling HTML layouts.

1. It adheres to current W3C web standards.
2. All modern browsers support CSS for controlling layouts.
3. If coded well, CSS makes it easy to apply global changes to the layout.
4. Proper implementation of content into XHTML documents, with the use of CSS solely for style and layout, helps create an accessible website for people with certain disabilities
5. Web pages often have less code, and are much thinner when XHTML and CSS are used.

<Table>s are designed for tabular data like numbers and statistics, not for presentation of layouts. This means we have to find an alternative: <div>s,a highly adaptive block-element tag which can work just as well as Tables. A <div>works like most other HTML tags. Most importantly you can give it an ID and assign attributes to it using CSS (in fact, this is the key to Table less layouts). <div>s can go inside other <div>s, can be floated, resized, recolored and positioned. If you can do it to a Table, you can do it to a <div>.

CSS MAGIC
	Tables-layout	Table less layout	CSS file
Lines of code	523	179	482
File size	25.5KB	10.4KB	14.98KB
100 pages:Lines of code	52,300	17,900	18,382
100 pages:File size	2550KB	1040KB	1044.58KB

Designing a page with CSS Positioning (CSS-P) can at first throw a bit of a challenge. Although the principles of good design remain the same, the techniques are widely different from those used when laying out a page with Tables. You really have to put away the things you already know and open your mind to something completely different. It's a bit like learning to cook with a microwave oven, but ultimately far more useful. The page you build is going to be quite straightforward, yet open enough to be built upon once you find your feet. There's no point learning to run before you can walk. Say you had a 100 page website... now before you go, "We'll never have a site that big," realize that web pages are like dog ears to human years... there is a multiplier effect. Websites nearly always have more pages than people know; it's just a fact of life. Based on even minor changes to the Tables layout page will require someone, you or your web firm, to make changes to 100 pages.